[squeak-dev] sends of #class and #== considered harmful, may we please stop?
Chris Muller
asqueaker at gmail.com
Thu Nov 22 17:20:38 UTC 2018
Hi guys,
Something I've been wanting to ask the community for years, but never
had the gumption, was about changing how we write our #= and #hash
methods, but now that we're combing through them anyway, I must!
Basically, it comes down to Proxy's. I want them to work better in
Squeak. But every time we put another send to #class or #== in an
implementation of #=, since those methods are inlined, they're too
brittle to work with Proxy's. This causes hard-to-trackdown bugs in
applications and mini-messes to deal with them since the app is forced
to change its code to become "aware" of potential Proxy'iness of an
object before comparing it with #=.
This is no surprise, since writing a send to #== instead of #= for no
more than "performance" is actually breaking encapsulation in the
first place...
There is an easy solution. When writing #= and #hash implementations,
use (#species or #xxxClass or #isKindOf: instead of #class) and #=
instead #==. So, for example, Eliot, I want to upgrade your new
Message>>#= to something like:
= anObject
^self xxxClass = anObject xxxClass
and: [selector = anObject selector "selector lookup is by identity"
and: [lookupClass = anObject lookupClass
and: [args literalEqual: anObject arguments]]]
Or #species or #isKindOf:, like we do in many other methods. Now the
method is Proxy-compatible.
What do you think?
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